


Ford and Lee

by WDW



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Mystery Trio, dimension hopping! self-indulgent descriptions of space! identity issues! angst! it's got it all, portal ford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 10:42:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8841475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WDW/pseuds/WDW
Summary: Ford’s seen a lot of himself over his years in the portal.  This one’s a bit different, however.  This one’s wearing a black t-shirt.  And his name... isn't Stanford?[somewhere in the multiverse, canon ford bumps into fanon pre-nwhs/atots 'stanley.'  he's not too happy]





	

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve had this as a WIP for a very long time, here it is completed with an open ending (I do have loads of ideas…) Half self-indulgent portal!Ford fic, half angst. Featuring pre-NWHS/ATOTS fanon Mystery Trio era Author!Stanley. Thanks to marypsue who gave me insight into characterization and general fandom theorizing of the time.
> 
> Written before Journal 3 and doesn’t take into account the whole ‘if two versions of the same person touch, the world implodes’ thing. Or does it?

 

Stanford Pines wanders through the multiverse for months and years and decades, over an uncertain, not-quite linear progression of time he measures only by the growing number of aches in his tired body. Every new civilization brought with it another calendar system, based on twin suns or moons or the deep geothermal fluctuations of an alien world. Very quickly, he learns that time is just another dimension.

Once in awhile, he wonders exactly how long he has been here, on the other side. How long it had been since he had desperately flung his research at Stanley, momentary panic overriding all logical thought as he screamed and begged for his brother to save him, help him, _do_ something, Stanley, _anything_ -

In the quiet moments, Ford wonders about how long it had been since his brother had given up on him.

There had been anger at the very beginning, a fire that burned hotly in his chest that had smoldered with time down to white-charred coals. That… had been a long, long time ago. Back when he just started adjusting to the fact that yes, he was in an alien world with a single pair of cracked glasses and the worn-in clothes on his back, and no, there was no way back home. Not ever.

Because - Stanley just didn’t _listen_ , and wasn’t that just typical? He had been so ready to burn Ford’s life’s work, he had been the one to push him into range of the portal, he had ruined everything, _again_ , and -

…Ford was never going to see him again, was he.

Most of the time, however, Ford does not think about his brother - or Fiddleford, or his home dimension, or even - _him_. He can’t afford to, not with the dark pit of hunger constantly gnawing at his insides, not with _his_ intergalactic bounty hunters lured by the hundreds and thousands of his wanted posters plastered across the multiverse. always vying for a coveted prize.

Above all, however, Ford has to keep moving. There’s no place for him to stop and sit and rest and sleep because he is an alien to every new galaxy he enters, a refugee into lands that immediately move to cast him out through natural and unnatural means alike.

Of course, there are spectacles and marvels too: intergalactic empires of trillions; eldritch embodiments of chaos that drifted sluggishly in the spaces between galaxies; creatures of every size and shape and element. Perhaps as a younger man, bright eyed and animated and utterly naive about the darker dangers of his studies, Stanford would have considered the past few years a kind of personal heaven.

That wonder still flares up occasionally, because as Fiddleford often admonishes - admonished - him for, there is an obstinate part of him that put his research and studies above, well, more _human_ priorities. Eating more than once a day, for example, or sleeping regularly, or not licking the mysterious substance off his fingers to identify them.

But for the most part, his experiences leave a sour taste in his mouth. The most fascinating and incredible of phenomena had a tendency to look deeper into _him_ than vice versa. That was not a lesson that Stanford would soon forget.

Yet, none of what he had encountered and experienced could prepare him for the day he saw himself at a Ganvaanian bazaar, browsing through goods absentmindedly at a distant stall.

Another Stanford Pines, from another world, dimension, timeline.

Another him. Another life.

It _was_ scientifically plausible, Stanford told himself fervently as he struggled to calm his own racing heart as he hid around the corner.

After all, with the existence of infinite dimensions confirmed, it was more likely than not that several variations of Ford’s own world existed - that, in certain ones, there existed a Stanford Filbrick Pines who was also cast into an interdimensional portal and sent spiraling into an alien landscape. All of them traveled the same nexus of worlds, after all. It was no surprise that he would run into another at some point.

At least, that was what he told himself that as he hurried away from his counterpart, ducking his head under the other man’s curious gaze and keeping his fists tightly clenched to hide his fingers.

That is what he told himself as he took the next ship out of the system the very next day, to somewhere thousands of lightyears away from Ganvaanar.

The fact that he would also be thousands of lightyears away from the other him… well, that had absolutely _nothing_ to do with it.

There were… some second thoughts afterwards, of course. He and the other Stanford would surely benefit from teamwork; two heads worked far better than one, as Ford had learned the hard way - the multiverse had few allies and even less friends. And really, if he thought about it, there was so much to _gain_ from talking to his counterpart.

He could find out how differently his life could have turned out and answer some of the hypotheticals he had always wondered about. Maybe he could figure out more of Bill’s weaknesses, or…

Or.

But none of that mattered, in the end, because… he finds that he cannot look at himself - any of himself - without a certain other person who shares his face coming to mind.

Not necessarily because of the resemblance; nowadays, Stanford and his iterations - with their graying hair and craggy face, all excess fat burnt away with the years of life on the run - looked quite different from the last memory he held of his brother’s young face, pale in the sickly blue light and sunken with guilt and horror.

The truth is, he did not want to know more about his mistakes: what he could have done right, what he could have done (even more) wrong… (if he wouldn’t have lost the people he did, made the mistakes he had, if he had just, _just_.)

Over the years and decades, Stanford saw more of himself, again and again - sometimes out of the corner of his eye, sometimes running from the intergalactic law enforcement or pickpocketing fruits from a distracted incorporeal vendor.

He took care always to keep out of their way, and told himself that there was no point getting involved. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose from breaking another Stanford Pines out of galactic prison. More attention was the least thing he - or any other Stanford, for that matter - needed in his life.

Then, one day, as Stanford made his way down a busy street in Belzaborp Below in full face-concealing regalia, a brown haired man with startlingly familiar features pushes past him in a clear panic.

Ford hesitated in momentary shock, turned, and watched his counterpart - yes, it had to be, with the nose and the jaw and the unmistakeable six-fingered hands - progress just a few feet into the dense crowd before going down in a burst of red blaster fire and a cry of pain.

The crowd backed away slightly from the wounded man, but otherwise ignored him as they moved on with their daily lives. Understandable, given the brutality of this world’s justice system and the general prejudice against bipedal organisms… but frustrating regardless.

Though. Really, Stanford should join them - he had told himself in the past not to get involved in the affairs of his counterparts, and attracting negative attention here meant another day long trek to the next planet with a docking bay that served his model of ship.

But then the other Stanford turned over, a hand clutching his smoking shoulder, and he looked - startlingly young, his face unmarred and round, almost chubby like his brother had been in their teens (not anymore, because Stanley’s face had been weathered and gaunt from a decade’s worth of hard living when he had come up to Oregon.)

He was also clearly an idiot, because he wore nothing more than a black tee shirt and a pair of long pants. Even his glasses were gone, lost somewhere in the preceding scuffle.

He looked almost like…

Ford swallowed, hard, and jogged the few steps forward.

“Come with me,” he hissed at his counterpart in rusty, gravelly English as he pulled him up and forward by the arm. “I’ll get you a ship off this planet. _Now._ ”

“ _Planet?”_ The other Stanford stammered, and stared back at him with wide, fearful eyes. “What is - I’m sorry, but where am I? Who _are_ you?”

Ford gritted his teeth, the slightest curl of frustration flickering to life. There was no time to explain, well, _anything._ “It’s me or them,” he said curtly, gesturing with his thumb at the approaching bounty hunters. Then, without waiting for a reply, he fumbled for the single magnet gun he always carried on his person and shoved it into his counterpart’s shaking hands.

“Magnet gun,” he explained without any fanfare. Knowing himself, the other man wouldn’t need much more than that. “Point and shoot. Ride the underside of the highway until you see, ah, a torpedo-shaped IV class cruiser in the E docking Bay. I have a perception filter installed, they can’t find you there. _Go.”_

The look of intrigue on the other man’s face was one that Ford knew all too well. Ford winced and flung out a hand to stall the forthcoming hour long excited rambling on the physics of thought and memory alteration.

“Not the time,” he stressed. This was an exchange, he had to admit, that he had never expected to be on the other side of.

His counterpart shut his mouth in vague surprise, smiled weakly, and opened his mouth for some kind of apology. But Ford had already wasted more time here than he wanted.

“Hold on tight,” he said simply, and flicked the switch.

The magnet gun powered on with a loud whirr of energy. The other Stanford let out a particularly high squeak of surprise before he was pulled up and into the air. Up he flew, at least a dozen feet before the muzzle of the magnet gun slammed and grabbed onto the chrome surface above.

For a brief moment they locked gazes, shocked eyes meeting tinted glass, before the other him began to slide away with accelerating speed. Within a minute, his counterpart was nothing more than a dark blur in the distance.

Ford let out a single breath of relief, before a clawed hand clapped onto his shoulder and spun him around to face a screeching, beaky face. He stared into three furious eyes, the meager starlight glinting eerily off of what seemed to be a layer of tapetum lucidum. A local, then - he recognized the chattering language though he could not understand it, and the indignation and confusion in its voice transcended words.

The blaster it held in its third - no, fourth arm looked pristine, unused, like some museum piece plucked off a mantel. Instead of wearing any kind of protective gear, it seemed to be wearing the local version of a t-shirt and jeans.

This wasn’t a bounty hunter, Ford realized, nauseated.

No, his counterpart’s pursuers weren’t coldblooded hunters who had killed or captured many other victims before. They were just civilians lured by the astronomical price tag Bill had put on his head. As Ford had realized over the years, even the more morally upright beings in the universe could be tempted at the prospect of several lifetimes’ worth of riches.

Regardless, its grip was clenched like iron around his shoulder. The group of his counterpart’s other pursuers was quickly approaching.

There was no other choice.

Taking advantage of the local’s distraction, Ford kept his face still and reached, slowly enough to be unnoticed for his own blaster. There _was_ a distinction between civilian and hunter. These were circumstances for long-drawn questions of mercy and guilt, of who deserved what, of who should deliver said judgement.

Unfortunately, Ford no longer had time for philosophical questions.

* * *

It took Ford several long hours to get back to his ship on foot. His newly dislocated arm made any faster method of transportation terribly risky, and when it came down to it, he could afford to walk. If his counterpart had made it to the ship safely, there was nothing to worry about. If he didn't… well, he hated to sound pragmatic, but there really was nothing he could do.

He spent a few frustrating minutes wrestling with the jammed opening mechanism before the doors finally sprang open. Ford took a single step in, automatically scanning the cramped cabin for signs of life -

\- and something slammed _hard_ into his left side. Something that was, for some reason, _yelling_ at the top of its lungs. Ford hit the ground hard, completely taken aback by surprise and all clear thought startled out of his mind by the sharp burst of pain from his arm.

“- I don’t know who you are,” came a familiar voice strained and high-pitched with panic, “but I assure you, I have a _weapon_ and I am _not_ afraid to -”

There was a sudden pause. Ford opened his eyes blearily to see his own, much younger face hovering a few inches above him, a look of sudden embarrassed realization on his face.

His assailant coughed sheepishly. “Um.”

Ford waited silently, less due to some infinitely deep well of patience and more from sheer confusion. That, and the ringing sound in his ears.

“You’re the man from before, aren’t you?” The other Stanford hazarded. “I, ah - well, it has been some time since I made my way here. And I thought, um, perhaps you had been… indisposed, or -”

There were a number of things that Ford could, and under better circumstances, would say. But given the white-hot pain radiating from his left arm and the dark spots prickling at the edges of his vision…

“Get off of me,” he said through gritted teeth. “ _Now_.”

His counterpart complied immediately, which was a single point in his favor, and Ford took a long, deep breath of relief. The other Stanford had felt surprisingly heavy. It was rather unfair, given that he remembered being relatively light before coming through the portal, most of his excess weight lost from the dozens of skipped meals and lack of, well, any kind of physical exertion other than occasional fieldwork - that was, running from a monster or two.

Or his memory was paying tricks on him. It… certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

“So,” the other man said awkwardly. “I - want to begin by thanking you for saving me from those…” He hesitated for a moment, struggling for words. “From… them. And I… I just want to, ah, _clarify_ that I have absolutely _no_ idea why they were after me, I haven’t done anything illegal. At least, I don’t think so, though it really depends on the specific definition of legality…”

He trailed off, clearly noticing Ford’s damning silence and realizing that he had said far more than he probably should have.

Ford sighed. “You said you had a weapon?” Maybe his counterpart wasn’t completely hopeless after all.

“Well, no - I mean, yes, but I might have, um. Exaggerated a bit.” The other Stanford let out a weak chuckle. “I mean, I do have my fists, and at the risk of sounding full of myself, I have never met a creature in all of Gravity Falls that could stand up to one of my left hooks…”

He trailed off weakly at Ford’s look of flat judgement.

…There was something unnerving about his counterpart that Ford could not put a finger on, not quite. He wasn’t _dangerous_ , at least not in any reason other than sheer incompetence. He felt… familiar, in a way that set his teeth on edge.

He kicked himself mentally. Of _course_ he felt familiar, he was _him_. What did he expect?

“Should…” His counterpart said carefully. “Should I introduce myself? I’m unsure if the same standard for niceties exists -”

“Trust me, I _know_ who you are,” Ford said with a sigh, pushing himself up with a single arm. His counterpart blinked in clear confusion at his reply, but he ignored him. That would be cleared up quickly enough. “You’re new to this, then?”

“New to… this?”

“Being on the other side of the portal,” Ford replied shortly, too exhausted to mince words. “How long has it been for you, a week? A few days? Your… ‘clothing’ couldn’t have survived anything longer than that, I’m sure.”

“You… know about the portal?” The other Stanford asked slowly, but it came not with the defensive paranoia he remembered from his earliest days on the other side, but with genuine curiosity and concern. “Does - does _everyone_ here on the other side know about it?”

Ford shook his head. Without saying a single word, he yanked his goggles off with his single working hand and shrugged off the protective cloth he had wrapped around the bottom half of his face. His features were completely exposed now, and judging from his counterpart’s look of complete and utter shock, age and weariness had not done nearly enough to disguise their shared face.

“You’re me,” the other man whispered, looking caught between wonder and horror.

“Our portal was a doorway between dimensions,” Ford explained smoothly. “Where we are here now is a nexus between worlds and timelines. Yes, my name _is_ Stanford Pines.” His counterpart tensed. “I have been here for nearly - two decades, at this point, though it really depends on the particular timestream and - well, I digress. I assume we share most of the same -”

“But Stanford, you’re not supposed to _be_ here.”

Ford’s mouth clicked close. That had not gone according to script. “…What?”

“Not in _any_ universe,” the other Stanford repeated, eyes wide with worry. “Stan, you and Fiddleford should be finding a way to fix the portal, you shouldn’t be _in_ here -”

Ford’s mind went suddenly, alarmingly blank. “Don’t call me that,” he said automatically. “My name is Ford. Stan’s - someone else,” he said at first, and then reconsidered. What was the point of avoiding the subject in front of the one person who would understand his circumstances? He sighed. “My brother. Not me.”

“Well,” the other Stanford said optimistically, after a puzzled pause. “That’s one point of divergence between our timelines. A bit of an… odd one to be sure. Though, that still brings up the question -”

“No, There is - something wrong here.”

Ford had latched onto that one incomplete exclaimation of _Stanford_ because… there was an absolute wealth of possibility there. Some terrifying, some hopeful, but all intriguing. “It’s not just childhood nicknames that are different between our timelines,” he said to himself thoughtfully. “How _exactly_ does Stanley know Fiddleford, in your universe?”

His counterpart blinked at him owlishly. “I’ve - well, I’ve known Fiddleford for almost a decade now. We even roomed together in college, back in the day.”

“No, I’m not talking about you,” Ford said again, as patiently as he could. “ _Stanley_.”

The other man stared at him for a long moment, before breaking into a confused but amicable grin. “Um. I - should probably introduce myself, shouldn’t I?”

Ford blinked. “I don’t see how that would -”

“I’m Stanley,” the other man said sheepishly. “Er, Stanley Pines.”

… _Oh._ “Not - Stanford?” he managed to croak - the best he could do, what with his mind shutting down on him.

“I have a twin brother named Stanford, if that’s what you mean,” his counterpart - or was he, after all? - continued awkwardly. “Though I expect you should know _that_ , given who you are.”

“But you have six fingers on each hand,” he tried, grasping at what little there still remained that made _sense_.

“Yes,” said Stanley - _Stanley_ \- cautiously, with the tone of a man had somehow tripped into a tiger cage. “I - do indeed.”

“ _So do_ _I.”_ He brandished all twelve of them at him, almost angrily.

Now it was his counterpart’s time to gawk. “But you just said your name was Stanford!”

“I need -” Ford said blankly, then sighed, pressing on both sides of his nose bridge in concentration. “I need a moment.”

The man in front of him had six fingers, a cleft chin, and evidently attended Backupsmore with Fiddleford as a roommate. All evidence pointed to him being - well, a Stanford by any other name.

Yet this situation was not as simple as him and his brother switching names at birth. In his counterpart’s universe, Fiddleford had actually _met_ Stanle - Stanfo - _Stan_ , instead of only knowing vaguely about his existence from the rare times Ford had utterly overestimated his alcoholic tolerance.

And. Stanle - the man in front of him spoke of his brother guilelessly, easily, without a trace of interfering anger or blame or discomfort. Despite his best efforts, Ford could not help but feel a jolt of - something sudden and painful, that left a sour taste in his mouth.

Of course, that was the exact moment the entire craft shook with the force of one massive heave, sending both men sprawling. 

Then came the deafeningly loud sounds of avian screeching from the outside and - alarmingly enough - the scraping of metal against metal.

Slowly and surely, the body of the ship began to tilt sideways.

Ford cursed, loudly and creatively. His counterpart gave him a look of horrified awe and - well, he had been living on his own for more than a decade now, it wasn’t as if he had an _audience_ in the past to have to tone himself down for.

He scrambled up and fell almost immediately, then with his body pressed close to the ground, clambered his way towards the controls.

“Didn’t you say you had a - perception filter installed?” Stanley asked with wide eyes. “I thought that meant that they couldn’t see us -”

“Yes,” Ford said blandly, focused on working the dozen or so levers that served as the craft’s operations. “However, it does _not_ in fact mean they cannot track down human life signatures and go through every ship in this yard one by one. The perception filter bought us time, time we no longer _have_.”

Or rather, he didn’t say, he had squandered entirely too much important time trying to figure out his mystery of a counterpart.

“Is - is there anything I can help with?” His counterpart tried, chastened. “I’m not familiar with the workings of this ship, but I’m a quick learner -”

“No need.”

With one last heave on Ford’s part, the spacecraft lifted up slightly into the air, albeit unsteadily. For a few uncertain seconds, it hovered hesitantly just a few feet above the ground. The cacophony outside turned louder and angrier for several terrifying moments before the craft shot up and out of hearing range, moving fast enough that Ford had to cling onto the walls to stay standing.

Within minutes, the maroon skies and orange clouds outside the windows melted into the quiet darkness of outer space.

Satisfied with the lack of pursuit, Ford checked the fuel gauges mournfully and swtiched on the autopilot course to the nearest non-hostile planet system. This ship wasn’t surviving past this journey, not with the damage done to its hull and its already existing wear and tear. After this, he was back to the arduous path of traveling on foot with the help of the occasional crack between dimensions.

A few feet behind him, there was the sound of hesitant footsteps.

“It’s _beautiful_ out there,” Stanle - no, he couldn’t think of him with that name - said softly, looking out the windows at the colorful dot vanishing into the distance. His eyes were bright with moisture. “Is - is this what you do?” He asked, clearly awed. “Travel through space like this?”

…And, of course he would think that, wouldn’t he? This naive younger version of himself who wasn’t truly himself, unburdened with years of regrets and betrayal in a way Ford could not remember ever being after the age of seventeen.

More than anything, he was curious despite himself as to how his counterpart _managed_ it. Had their father not kicked Stan out of house and home in the aftermath of the project fiasco? Or had his brother simply not broken his project in the first place? And yet, he had mentioned Backupsmore and Fiddleford and Gravity Falls, but not even once had he brought up _Bill._ Which meant -

…There were many questions, too many of them. But as Ford realized as he looked tiredly at his counterpart, the full awareness of what he had just _done_ hitting him like a battering ram… there was both time and opportunity to answer them.

Because he had plucked this other version of himself from his original path. Because in some way, he was _responsible_ for this - this young researcher with stars in his eyes, so eager to traipse into the unknown with nothing more than a black tee shirt and a pair of work pants.

And most of all, because he was _stuck with him_. At least… for the next fourteen hours before the ship reached its course, though Ford had a hinting suspicion that if he didn’t want the hard work of saving this life negated in seconds, he would have to look after his doppelganger for quite a while longer.

“Yes,” Ford said simply, “I do.”

And it wasn’t completely a lie, was it? He did travel through space. Just not in nearly as glamorous or painless of a way the other man was thinking.

For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Finally, his counterpart tore his gaze away from the galaxies streaming by at light-speed and turned around.

“What happens now?” He asked, eyes shining.

There were a lot of things he could say, the possibilities spreading across his mental landscape like dominos. Ford could move to continue their earlier conversation and figure out what exactly lied in the divergence between their universes. He could ask about Bill and what role - or lack thereof - the demon played in the events leading up to this portal’s creation.

Or, all else aside, he could give a non-answer, say the name of their destination, and get some well-deserved sleep.

Ford looked at his counterpart, up and down, and sighed. “You can keep those pants, but that tee shirt is going out the airlock,” he said wearily. “You’re going to need a lot more than that to survive the next decade.”


End file.
